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Dumplings

Soft dough dumplings simmered with hen pieces in a butter gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift baking powder into flour, cut in butter, and add enough milk to form a soft dough.

  2. Form the dough into balls slightly larger than walnuts and drop them into the gravy, which should not be thickened.

Make the gravy

  1. In an iron pot, heat ½ cup butter until slightly browned, then add the hen pieces one by one.

  2. Once the meat is soaked in butter, pour in boiling water to cover and simmer gently until the meat almost falls from the bones.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Twenty minutes before serving, remove the meat and place it in the center of a warm platter.

  2. Drop the dumplings into the gravy, cover tightly, and boil for 20 minutes.

  3. Serve the dumplings around the meat, covered with rich golden brown gravy.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pastry flour
Forms the main structure of the dumplings once mixed into a dough.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the dumplings rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds richness and browning to the gravy and tenderizes the dough.
Young hen
Provides the meat and, as it simmers, the flavorful body of the gravy.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the dough holds together softly.

The step that matters

Drop the dumplings into the gravy and cover tightly. Dumplings must cook in simmering liquid with a lid on, so steam cooks their centers while they rise. Boiling too hard or lifting the lid can make them dense or soggy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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